It is but natural that the civilization of which we first hear had reached a stage which could not have been attained to, except after a time certainly represented by tens of thousands of years. It is but natural that, as with a tree, the growth should have been at first slow as compared with the growth afterwards, when expansion is possible at many points. It is to be remembered that at the times which we first begin to consider as historic, history of a primitive kind and on a small scale had been going on for a time far longer than all the rest of the course of history has taken. But it is to bt remembered that, as it is on a small scale, it is the less important from the point of view of the history of the world.
This slowness of growth is the natural result of the control exercised by geography. Just because geo graphical conditions are controls and not forces they take much longer time to make their effect felt than do forces, but in the long run the results of these controls are evident, perhaps all the more effectively. Because certain conditions exist, and certain other conditions do not exist, it is found in the long run better to act in a particular way. It takes a longer time for a man or race to find this out than to be told it; but there is this advantage : by finding it out, it is certain that the intellectual level has been reached which is necessary to use the discovery intelligently. There is no dangei of an artificial civilization—a cram-civilization—being imposed on the race, so that more harm than good is done.
To sum up what has been said, we should expect to find the first dawnings of civilization in some place where life might be sustained comparatively easily, but where the cycle is not the day, i. e. some place where work for the present and future is necessary. In addition, we should expect to find the earliest civilized races in some spot where a community large enough to be some thing more than a family or tribe, yet small enough to form and feel itself a whole, would be afforded a consider able measure of protection against foes whose powers of destruction were greater than their powers of con struction. Also when first we begin to know of these races, it is to be expected that many ages have passed since they emerged from savagery.
Now, in Egypt we see a land with a genial climate. Though rainless, and consequently protected on either hand by desert, it has a supply of water. This water supply, tblough seasonal, is also constant. These seem ing contradictions are explained only if Egyptian geo graphy is understood. The Nile has two sources, one
in the region of constant equatorial rain, from which a supply, equalized by the existence of lakes and swamps, is rendered so steady that little variation in flow is ex perienced all through the year. The other source is in the highland region of Abyssinia, a land with a seasonal range of rainfall, so that in late spring and early sum mer deluges descend to the plain and from the plain to the dry land farther north.
Egypt is the Delta of the Nile and the lower Nile Valley for some 700 miles from its mouth—a narrow ribbon, for the most part ten miles wide, following the course of the great river to the sea. It is watered by the river and protected by the all-but-impassable desert. That protection is even more complete than it seems. The Nile in its lower course flows through a land of limestone. Out of this it has first worn a valley, and then filled the valley with alluvium brought by the floods from Abyssinia. South of the modern Aswan, however, it flows through sandstone, below which are great masses of hard rock. The river has here for great distances worn no valley but merely gorges separated by cataracts. A yard or two from the river's side there is bare desert; practically nothing will grow; there is no inducement to settle, and Egypt is shut off from the south almost as completely as from the east and west.
On the north there is the sea, and in days when the sea was unknown it formed as great a protection as the desert. In no other land do we find such conditions, suited in so extraordinary a degree for the nurture of an early civilization.
From the first scraps that we can learn of the long past history of Egypt, we see it occupied by a race of men who, at any rate, are not of the lowest order of savages. They appear, however, only to give place to another race certainly with a higher civilization, but of whom we know little else. These people lived peaceably in the Nile Valley probably for 2000 years before those whom we call the Ancient Egyptians appeared on the scene.
The Egyptians in their turn, when they began to rule the land, about 4500 B.C., absorbed the civilization of those whom they found in possession, and compara tively quickly carried it to a still higher plane, so that by 3700 B.C., when the 4th Dynasty of Egyptian kings ruled the whole country from the first cataract to the sea, a very considerable advance had been made, and the people had reached a degree of organization which rendered possible the building of the greatest pyramids.